The name:

Hit Those Keys was named after my first Mac, which was named after a series of faithful typewriters.

Somewhat confusingly, for the purposes of this story, they—the typewriters—were all named Aurora D, after the prolific French novelist Aurore Dupin, who wrote under the pen name of George Sand. She wrote 70 novels, 24 plays and over 40,000 letters. “My profession,” she wrote, “is to be free.” Living by her pen was among the freedoms she attained, an achievement to be applauded for any artist, in any age.

For me, the name “Aurora D” embodied a kind of spur to more ambitious creative output. However, my husband always thought the typewriter’s name was “Hit Those Keys,” because I had a sticky label on it like this:

As a spur to creative output, that works too. Hit Those Keys became the name of a succession of faithful Macs, and then of this site, and now is synonymous with my web studio.

The art:

Photographic images are either my own or licensed stock photography. All the graphic images are original. Admire them, by all means, but please don't steal them. That’s not nice.

The typography:

To conform to my theme, the design used to feature —sometimes slavishly, sometimes playfully—various typewriter fonts.

Enough already. The logotype is set in the handsome Arno serif family from Adobe, and the body copy is mostly Georgia, with occasional jolts of Candara.

The design:

This is my third implementation of a CSS-driven design. What is here is accessible, legible, and at least moderately attractive on most browsers and devices. Happily, everything validates.

What you're viewing is a redesign deployed in April, 2008, but it harks back to the original design of this site, which had headlines of gray, pink accents and lots of white space. The brief I gave myself this time around was to have a little fun with the modular columns and to otherwise get out of my own way.

Lest things get dull, now and then things are broken or wonky because I’ve been playing and forgot to clean up.

The personnel:

That would be me, sole proprietor. A one-woman shop. If it seems like something you were expecting to see on the site is taking a long time to appear, that’s why.

The fine print:

This site is made of at least 60% post-consumer recycled phosphors. No actual typewriters were harmed during its production.